5,200 Days in Space | Hacker News Reader

5,200 Days in Space

theatlantic.com

48 pointsmarkmassie10 comments

Interesting to note: whenever the ISS comes up in European or Russian media, it is presented as an international, collaborative scientific enterprise. When it comes up in American media, it is presented solely as an American achievement. The same is true for the coverage of all other international scientific collaborations (the ISS being one of the greatest example there is, alongside ITER).

Most Americans who know about the ISS aren't even aware that the ISS is not a NASA-only, American project. Ask around you, you'll see.

Case in point in this article:

"It’s a little strange when you think about it: Just about every American ninth-grader has never lived a moment without astronauts soaring overhead, living in space. But chances are, most ninth-graders don’t know the name of a single active astronaut—many don’t even know that Americans are up there. We’ve got a permanent space colony, inaugurated a year before the setting of the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a stunning achievement, and it’s completely ignored."

To be fair though, the majority of ISS funding comes from NASA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station_pro...

Over 90% of the funding comes from NASA, NASA also supplied most of the hardware for the station even for the EU, Russian and Japanese modules, there isn't a single part of the station that didn't have at least 50% US contribution to it, with the average contribution summing to about 75% of the station's construction. And I've never seen US media treat the ISS as a US project, also while ninth graders might not know astronauts by name these days (mostly because the media stopped covering every single launch and mission as they did in the Gemini, Apollo and early shuttle days) i some doubt it that even 6th graders don't know that there are American astronauts pretty much every day up there...

Most Americans who know about the ISS aren't even aware that the ISS is not a NASA-only, American project. Ask around you, you'll see.

If you are willing to do a randomized survey to prove or disprove your claim, than I'll believe the survey.

I don't take personal experience or anecdote or impression of what people believe about people as evidence.

If anyone really cares, it looks like you could do it for about 10 cents per data point:

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/pricing

> When it comes up in American media, it is presented solely as an American achievement.

It's not. American media often focuses on the American aspects of the project, but that is not the same thing as excluding or denying the contributions of other nations, which is what would be required to present it "solely as an American achievement".

When it comes up in American media, it is presented solely as an American achievement.

Except for every time they discuss needing the Russians to get there and back. Which is pretty much every time it comes up in our media.

so $150B/5200 = 28MM . So $1.2 million per hour. and for 3 occupants, $400,000 per hour each.

I am sure the experience is awesome, but i wonder if space could have been done better.

Space could certainly be done better (I think the key advance would be the ability to upload human minds to solid-state substrate - that would make a lot of the problems of living in space dramatically easier), but it doesn't follow that it could have been done better. It's part of life that we have to try inefficient ways of doing things in order to learn what we need to know before we can figure out the efficient ways.

Dumb question.

The right question is: Why people still want to get out of the planet? Because they are people. And because of other people.

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